The Girl from Human Street

by Roger Cohen

  The city must grow for the reef that keeps giving. Gold production soars. New corporations multiply. Johannesburg from its inception is a commercial town. Its thing is money. It is gaudy and vulgar, a city of English and Boers, Jews and Greeks, Americans and Italians, Chinese and Indians, all of them hustlers at a new frontier. The immigrants are not alone. The townships that sprawl around the city’s limits are home to black miners who have been drawn to the Rand in search of money to take back to their families in the East Cape or Basutoland. Tens of thousands of them have already arrived by 1895, living in appalling conditions, vulnerable to moonshine and midday heat.

  My maternal great-grandfather from the East End of London, Sidney Adler, was present at Johannesburg’s creation. Born on April 10, 1861, he attended the Jews’ Free School and was apprenticed as a cabinetmaker before sailing for South Africa on the Leuton in 1878. A variety of jobs followed: bookkeeper in Cape Town, diamond digger in Lydenburg, cook and furniture repairer in Kimberley, gold prospector in Barberton, and hydraulic pump operator in a Vereeniging coal mine.

  The mine did not fare well. Equipment being transported from Cape Town was lost in the Vaal River after a bridge collapsed. Adler moved on. An account by his daughter Lily describes his arrival in Johannesburg in 1887:

  Sid opened a small liquor business at the corner of Fraser and Commissioner Streets. It was a single storied tin shack with a mud floor. This was one of the first Public saloons and was named “Maggie’s Bar” after the buxom blonde barmaid named Maggie. The bar became very popular and miners, very often down on their luck, rubbed shoulders with budding mining magnates who could enjoy a chat and drink together. The Stock Exchange was nearby. It consisted of a chain across Commissioner Street with the brokers on the one side and the public on the other.

  Madness gripped the Stock Exchange in 1888, people screaming, fortunes being made and lost in minutes as gold shares rocketed, then collapsed. Sink a shaft, give it a name, incorporate yourself, and trade the paper after a couple of drinks at Maggie’s Bar.

  In the early days, Johannesburg was sometimes referred to as “Jewburg” or “Judasburg.”

  With his interest in the liquor business, Sidney Adler would have been labeled a “Peruvian.” This was the odd, pejorative term denoting the mass of uneducated, poor Jews pouring into the city and setting up as canteen keepers or peddlers or small tradesmen. The term may have been an acronym for Polish and Russian Union, a Jewish club in Kimberley in the early days; its origin is unclear. The Johannesburg Times of 1896 carried this description: “To the ordinary member of the public he presents the apparition of a slovenly, unkempt and generally unwashed edition, in various numbers, of the wandering Jew. As a sort of commercial shield, he carries a basket of eggs on his right arm, while holding his money tightly clenched in his sinister hand.”

  The Peruvian designation reflected disquiet about the number of Jews arriving in Johannesburg. One correspondent, J. A. Hobson of The Manchester Guardian, consulted an early city directory and was disturbed to find “sixty-eight Cohens against twenty-eight Jones and fifty-three Browns.” During the Anglo-Boer War of 1899–1902 that would lead to the unification of South Africa, some Jews fled back to the Cape. For Lady Cecil, the wife of the British high commissioner, the worst refugees were “the Jews who had come to South Africa from the ghettos of Eastern Europe … a curious people, in rags, with their belongings in untidy bundles and yet it was often found that they were quite well off, and the possessors of valuables.”

  A prospectus about South Africa published by the Jewish Colonization Association in St. Petersburg in 1905 suggested the extent of the Jewish presence in Johannesburg: “They participate in all areas of industry.… Many immigrants are involved in small trade business. Until recently, the alcohol business was very profitable; alcohol was sold to kaffirs; today the law prohibits the alcohol business and punishes it with six months imprisonment, therefore immigrants establish small shops.” It estimated the Jewish population of the Transvaal at 25,000, or 20 percent of the “European” population.

  Adler moved on from Maggie’s to open the Red Lamp Bar and Saloon on Commissioner Street. He then tried his luck with Steyn’s Bar in nearby Fordsburg, where, at the age of thirty-six, he met Kate Cohen, who had recently arrived from London to visit her sister. They were married in 1897 in the Park Street synagogue, inaugurated by President Kruger in 1892. Together they opened the Transvaal Hotel on De Villiers Street in Johannesburg, before running The Old Pioneer on the corner of Loveday and Plein Streets. Bedrooms opened out onto a shared veranda. Many of the guests were Cornish miners from England who would hand over their salaries to Adler for room, board, and booze. The couple, by now with four children, sold out in 1915 and moved to the relative peace of Natal, where in Newcastle, on the road from Johannesburg to Durban, they ran the twenty-bedroom Commercial Hotel for many years. It was a popular place to break the journey to the coast. Once a week a bioscope—or movie—was shown in the town hall.

  Black-and-white photographs of Sidney Adler all show him as an established family man and proprietor. There are no images of his hustling Red Lamp Bar and Saloon days. He has made his mark in the new country. He is short and stout and well tailored. The gold chain of his pocket watch loops across his buttoned vest, and a handkerchief puffs from his breast pocket. His shoes are shined, stern moustache trimmed, hands clasped behind his back until, in later years, the right hand grips a cane. Even on the beach he wears a jacket. He never smiles. By repute, he never swears. He is stoical, a trait inherited by Laurie and by my mother (who was also an immaculate dresser). When gout causes his toes and elbows to swell to the size of tennis balls, he does not complain. His wife, a fraction taller than he, favors bold floral dresses that envelop her matronly form. They are a straight-backed couple. “There are three things in life,” she likes to say, “punctuality, cleanliness and honesty.” And: “If you can’t say anything nice about somebody, don’t say anything.”

  My great-grandfather Sidney Adler, a Johannesburg pioneer, 1918

  In these images, the incomer’s struggle, the dusty past, the uncertain roads, and the long saloon nights have been eclipsed. The pain of uprooting, repeated in my family with each generation for more than a century now, has been concealed. There is a single photograph of me seated on my great-grandmother Kate Adler’s lap when we arrived in South Africa in 1955. She was a widow then; Sidney had died earlier that year at the age of ninety-four. She wears a double string of pearls around her neck. Her expression is watchful and wise. She had lived in London before that visit to her sister in 1897. Her life is ending; she presses her hands to my six-month-old chest; she will be dead within eighteen months. My twenty-six-year-old mother is seated beside us. She is radiant with new motherhood and her return to South Africa.

  Four generations: I am seated on the lap of my great-grandmother Kate Adler, with my grandmother Flossie and mother, June, 1955

  The resemblance between Sidney Adler and Laurie is striking: the same compact build, clipped moustache, and military bearing. But Laurie’s expression in photos is more carefree. He had not known the hardscrabble immigrant years. Born at the turn of the century in Johannesburg, he would be in the second graduating class from the Witwatersrand Medical School in 1925. That class had seventeen graduates; there were just four graduates the previous year. Some of the lectures, in botany and zoology, were given in tin huts adjoining the School of Mines, and early graduates were known as “Tin Templers.” Jewish life, having stood still for centuries in the shtetl, immobilized in devotion and contemplation, was fast-forwarded by Africa.

  I went with Laurie to Vereeniging, where his father had operated the hydraulic pump in the coal mine in the late nineteenth century. Laurie was a doctor whose real interest was business. After World War II he had a profitable idea. Tuberculosis was rampant, particularly among the black population. As a young medical officer in 1930, he had written a “Survey of Tuberculosis in the Pretoria, Witwatersrand and V
ereeniging Areas.” Now he concocted a persuasive interpretation of the labyrinth of apartheid laws that obliged the Afrikaner-led government of the National Party to pay for treatment of “native” tubercular and mental health patients. With partners, Laurie established a corporation that ran the hospitals, often on premises acquired from closed mines, whose vast spartan dormitories with concrete beds could be converted into wards. The company provided all the facilities. The government paid per patient and per day. It was a lucrative business.

  The place we went to see in Vereeniging was a mental hospital. We stood in a fenced area, in the middle of a large crowd of blacks with faraway gazes, jerky gestures, and twisted smiles. Laurie handed out shoes and barked orders. His years “up north” in Egypt during the war as a lieutenant colonel with the South African armed forces had ensconced brusque habits of command. One man threw his shoes onto the corrugated-iron roof. He was escorted away. A roll call revealed a missing patient. Sometime before, a patient had wandered out onto the railway line and been killed by a train. The situation seemed combustible. Laurie, unruffled, extolled the care and the food. I looked at him: a stocky, bald white man in a white shirt and pressed khaki shorts and long socks standing in the midst of a horde of troubled blacks with swollen ankles and unfocused eyes. What struck me was his assurance. I don’t think Laurie ever allowed doubt to cloud his confidence or dampen his lust for life, even when his own daughter, my mother, became mentally ill. He knew about mental illness but could not acknowledge it within his own family.

  My father is not one for family trees. Still, when my mother tried to commit suicide in 1978, he mapped out her antecedents as a scientific exercise. On the genealogical table, he placed a black dot beside those afflicted with mania, manic depression, or depression. Black dots abound. One is inked in next to Laurie’s sister Lily, another beside his sister Mickey. On my mother’s mother’s side, the situation is no happier. Of the six children of Isaac Michel and his wife, Jennie, three suffered from mental instability. Flossie, my grandmother, was spared. Two of her brothers and her youngest sister were not.

  My forebears broke with the past, shed it, tried to bury it, losing touch with one another and fanning out across the world. There was the ebb and flow of fortune and the struggles of Jewish identity and assimilation—and all the while they carried within them a gene that formed an unbroken chain with the past, liable to surface in any setting and at any moment. They carried within them something intrinsic to the depressive state: loss. What else, after the adrenaline, is uprooting but loss? In The Rings of Saturn, W. G. Sebald writes, “My rational mind is nonetheless unable to lay the ghosts of repetition that haunt me with ever greater frequency.” Few escape these ghosts of repetition. Life idles and accelerates, as I learned in the quiet and quickening South African dawn of the Kruger Park. It also doubles back.

  Human Street runs through the center of Krugersdorp, a modest town thirty miles west of Johannesburg. Hominid fossils dating back more than three million years have been found in the area. The street runs straight, with a line of gnarled plane trees down the middle. It is busiest around the intersection with Market Street, where a cluster of cell phone stores now do business.

  The West Rand Consolidated mine used to be located at the end of Market, but the mine is closed. The reef that made South Africa stopped yielding gold here some years ago. Krugersdorp was one of the many settlements strung out along the sixty-mile-long gold gusher of the Witwatersrand. A vast slag heap of yellow cyanide sand, as flat-topped as Table Mountain, testifies to the volume of earth dislodged in pursuit of the most coveted and ductile of metals. Storms would blow in from Randfontein and you would see them split over the dump. Krugersdorp without gold was orphaned.

  The town grew in the shadow of Johannesburg and for the same reason. One of its first residents was Abner Cohen (no relation), who built the Monument Hotel in 1887—the same year Sidney Adler opened Maggie’s Bar in Johannesburg. By 1894 the Jewish community in Krugersdorp was large enough to host a minyan; a service was held that year at Rosh Hashanah. In 1902 the town’s first synagogue was founded, with Cohen as its president.

  Human Street in the reef mining town of Krugersdorp, where my mother was born in 1929 DANIEL LEVY

  For many years the Jewish community of Krugersdorp prospered, active in mining and commerce, outgrowing its original redbrick synagogue on Burger Street. (A Star of David engraved on the facade is today the only clue to the past of the shuttered building.) A larger synagogue of proud proportions was built on Potgieter Street and opened in 1966. But soon enough Jews began to dwindle with the town’s fortunes. The synagogue, too big for its congregation, was sold to the Christian Faith Worship Center. A banner at its entrance now says: “Not all questions can be answered by Google. Follow the word of God.” Inside, the front wall is adorned with a large mosaic in Hebrew of the Ten Commandments, the back wall with an image of a menorah, and along the side wall in giant lettering run the words JESUS IS KING. June would have hooted with laughter until she had to wipe the tears from her eyes.

  My mother at 3 Human Street

  My mother was born at 3 Human Street in Krugersdorp on June 3, 1929. Laurie, her father, had established himself there. After qualification at Wits and his marriage to Flossie in 1925, he became mine medical officer to West Rand Consolidated and later medical officer of health for Krugersdorp. He was dapper, like his father, a good boxer, an energetic man, an organizer. In 1924, almost half a century after his cockney father, Sidney, arrived from London in a South Africa that was not yet a Union, he had become president of the student representative council of the University of the Witwatersrand. Laurie had that incalculable asset: a good temperament.

  Laurie with June and brother Sydney, South Africa, 1938

  June was a breath-holder as an infant, a condition often linked to frustration or some painful experience. Her father was busy, her elegant mother remote and sparing with physical affection. June was bright, gregarious, intense, and pretty, with side-parted dark hair and skinny knock-kneed legs. Her brother, Sydney (with a different spelling from his grandfather as a nod to the Jewish injunction against naming children after the living), had been born two years earlier. They would ride together along the ridge to Johannesburg in the rumble seat of Laurie’s car, the warm air ruffling her curls. She would try to tag along with Sydney when he went out in a gang of Jewish boys to take on the Afrikaners who goaded the Krugersdorp Jode (Jews). When a brawl started, she would run away.

  Life was placid and predictable in Krugersdorp. The landscape told a single story, of the rush for gold. It was there in the mine dumps and there in the gum trees around the shafts, planted because they grew rapidly and could provide timber to buttress tunnels and low gullies leading to the reef where black miners labored. A thin line tied the whites perched in Africa to the European civilization with which they identified. In such churned-up earth yielding finite wealth, what sort of roots could be planted? This European annex was fragile.

  In 1936, when June was seven, upheaval came. Laurie took the family on a return journey to Britain, where he did postgraduate work in public health at Edinburgh University. Little June and Sydney were packed off to English boarding school at Frensham Heights in Surrey. The first children to meet them there in the school’s mock-Tudor mansion had a question: If you’re really from Africa, how come you’re not black?

  Life was full of puzzles. Brambles and foxes and berry picking and plummy British accents were not what June had been acquainted with in Krugersdorp. Using a pencil, she wrote a postcard to Laurie in 1936. The image on the card is of a child wearing a crown startled by blackbirds hovering around a pie: Sing a song of sixpence / A pocket full of Rye / Four and twenty blackbirds / Baked in a pie. June writes: “Dear Dad, I hope you are very well. Mum came to see us. I hope you are getting on. Lots love, June xx.” At seven, in boarding school in a foreign land, you adapt, or at least you try to, and you may want to fly away.

  Laurie wrote back
from Edinburgh to my mother, now on a school break with Flossie at the Hotel Royale in Bournemouth: “I have been working hard but often think of you my precious one and hope you [are] having a real good time. You must be sweet to mother so that she does not get upset.” On May 12, 1937, he sent her a “Coronation Souvenir” postcard commemorating the crowning of King George VI at Westminster Abbey. The new king’s brother had abdicated a few months earlier to marry his American mistress. “Darling June,” it says. “Hope you like this card—please write to me. Daddy.”

  June and Sydney in England, 1936

  Sometimes, on breaks from school in London, June would stay near Marble Arch with her great-uncle Michael Adler. A distinguished rabbi, Adler had compiled the 1916 Prayer Book for Jewish Sailors and Soldiers at the front during World War I and served as chaplain to Jewish soldiers. It begins with a “prefatory note” signed by him: “This abbreviated form of the Prayer Book has been compiled for the use of Jewish Members of His Majesty’s Navy and Army. It is hoped that this book will meet the wants of the very large number of English Jews who are taking part in the present Great European War.” On the last page is a personal note from Adler: “The God of Israel keep you all and bring you safely home with victory.” The first prayer for the sixteen thousand British Jews on active service includes this line: “Fill our hearts with courage and steadfastness that we may perform our duty to our King and Country for the honor of Israel and the Empire.”